No More Learning

Antipathist of Light!
Fate's only essence! primal scorpion rod--
The one permitted opposite of God! "

Goethe's devil is an abstraction of scorn. He "maketh a mock" alike of
good and evil! But Byron's devil is a spirit, yet a mortal too--the
traducer, because he has suffered for his sins; the deceiver, because he
is self-deceived; the hoper against hope that there is a ransom for the
soul in perfect self-will and not in perfect self-sacrifice. Byron did
not uphold Lucifer, but he "had passed that way," and could imagine a
spiritual warfare not only against the _Deus_ of the Mysteries or of the
Book of Genesis, but against what he believed and acknowledged to be
the Author and Principle of good.

_Autres temps, autres moeurs! _ It is all but impossible for the modern
reader to appreciate the audacity of _Cain_, or to realize the alarm and
indignation which it aroused by its appearance. Byron knew that he was
raising a tempest, and pleads, in his Preface, "that with regard to the
language of Lucifer, it was difficult for me to make him talk like a
clergyman," and again and again he assures his correspondents (_e. g. _ to
Murray, November 23, 1821, "_Cain_ is nothing more than a drama;" to
Moore, March 4, 1822, "With respect to Religion, can I never convince
you that _I_ have no such opinions as the characters in that drama,
which seems to have frightened everybody? " _Letters_, 1901, v. 469; vi.
30) that it is Lucifer and not Byron who puts such awkward questions
with regard to the "politics of paradise" and the origin of evil.
Nobody
seems to have believed him. It was taken for granted that Lucifer was
the mouthpiece of Byron, that the author of _Don Juan_ was not "on the
side of the angels. "

Little need be said of the "literature," the pamphlets and poems which
were evoked by the publication of _Cain: A Mystery_. One of the most
prominent assailants (said to be the Rev. H. J. Todd (1763-1845),
Archdeacon of Cleveland, 1832, author _inter alia_ of _Original Sin_,
_Free Will_, etc. , 1818) issued _A Remonstrance to Mr. John Murray,
respecting a Recent Publication_, 1822, signed "Oxoniensis. " The sting
of the _Remonstrance_ lay in the exposure of the fact that Byron was
indebted to Bayle's _Dictionary_ for his rabbinical legends, and that he
had derived from the same source his Manichean doctrines of the _Two
Principles, etc. _, and other "often-refuted sophisms" with regard to the
origin of evil. Byron does not borrow more than a poet and a gentleman
is at liberty to acquire by way of raw material, but it cannot be denied
that he had read and inwardly digested more than one of Bayle's "most
objectionable articles" (_e. g. _ "Adam," "Eve," "Abel," "Manichees,"
"Paulicians," etc. ). The _Remonstrance_ was answered in _A Letter to Sir
Walter Scott, etc.